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Empty bed at The Perley and Rideau Veterans' Health Centre in Ottawa Friday Oct. 27, 2017. The Perley and Rideau Veterans' Health Centre, The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) and the Champlain Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) will announce the launch of an innovative project to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to elderly patients recovering from short-term illnesses as well as surgery and accidents.Tony Caldwell/Postmedia Network

Canadians waiting for medical attention are faced with record-breaking wait times – and it doesn’t appear to be getting any better, according to the Fraser Institute.

The research think-tank released a new report Thursday, Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2017, and found the median wait time in 2017 is 21.2 weeks – the longest ever recorded. By comparison, Canadians waited 9.3 weeks in 1993 when the Institute first started reporting on wait times for medical treatments.

The Toronto Sun spoke with the Baccus Barua, the report’s author and associate director of health policy studies at the Fraser Institute.

Getty files.

Why are wait times the longest reported in Canada right now?

“We’ve been doing this survey for over 20 years now and at 21.2 weeks, this is definitely the longest wait times we’ve recorded in Canada. The simple and short answer of why this is happening is because there actually hasn’t been any real shift in policy during this time to address this issue.”

Last year, there was an average of about 20 weeks for the median wait time in Canada. What has actually changed since 1993 when wait times were at 9.3 weeks?

“The way that Canada has decided to structure its universal healthcare system is quite unique. It’s not unique that we have it, but the policies we put into place – things like not understanding that the private sector can be a partner or pressure valve, not understanding that co-payments are actually a normal system of the universal healthcare system, funding our hospitals on the basis of global budgets, rather than activity – that’s something that’s remained constant. Whenever we see problems manifest themselves, we react by throwing money at the problem. Unfortunately, the evidence has indicated that simply doesn’t work. It may work for a year or two as a band-aid solution, but overarchingly, so long as we continue to pursue policies that set us apart from other successful universal healthcare systems, we’ll probably be seeing the same issues in the future.”

Will it get worse? Is Canada properly equipped to handle a growing patient load?

“It’s already showing that we’re not meeting what our patients and physicians would like to see in the healthcare system. We have to remember that wait times are not benign inconveniences. They can result in patients waiting in pain, mentally or physically, they could be needing caregivers, they can see their situation deteriorate into something debilitating. We are looking at the economic cost – and it was pegged at $1.7 billion at the low mark last year. We have a growing aging population. Unless you see somebody doing something different, there’s no reason to expect this situation to improve.”

Why does Ontario have the shortest wait times at 15.4 weeks? And how can we improve?

“This report doesn’t allow us to pinpoint why there is variation between provinces. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with spending. Alberta is spending far above what other provinces are, but they have a wait time of 26.5 weeks. With Quebec and Ontario, we’ve always seen slightly lower wait times. It might have to do with economies of scale, I’m not certain. It’s interesting to see the (Ontario) wait time at 15.4 weeks in 2017 and in 1993, at 9.1 weeks, so it’s the shortest in Canada now, but look how far it’s gone where it was in 1993. That really isn’t saying much.”

(Note: interview has been edited for length)

KEY POINTS OF THE REPORT

The median wait time in Canada is 21.2 week between referral from a family doctor to receipt of treatment. That’s the longest — about 128% longer — Fraser Institute has ever recorded and since it has been tracking wait times since 1993. In 2016, the median wait time was 20 weeks.

Report author Baccus Barua said there’s more ways to look at the health care system than just universal healthcare or an Americanized private system. “There are at least 29 other countries with a universal healthcare system, many of them are doing it better than us. They’re spending about the same or less, but they all have shorter wait times than we do. When we look Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, France and Germany — they all say the private sector is a partner in the delivery or a ‘pressure valve’ when the public can’t cope, they understand hospitals have to be funded on activity basis.”

Ontario reports the shortest wait time time at 15.4 weeks (nearly four months), while New Brunswick reports the longest at 41.7 weeks in 2017. There is also a great deal of variation among specialties — the longest wait between a GP referral and orthopaedic surgery is 41.7 weeks, while those waiting for medical oncology begin treatment in 3.2 weeks.

It’s estimated that across the 10 provinces the total number of procedures for which people are waiting in 2017 is 1,040,791. This year, Canadians could expect to wait 4.1 weeks for a computed tomography (CT) scan, 10.8 weeks for a MRI scan and 3.9 weeks for an ultrasound.

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